Health and Social Care

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Gerald Howarth

Monday 13th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

I will come back to the right hon. Gentleman in a minute.

Thirdly, I welcome the further attempts to bear down on regulation. We need to do much more to liberate businesses from regulation, but we are, of course, inhibited by Europe, on which I wish to say a few words later.

Fourthly, the reform of long-term care arrangements has not come before time. I recommend to my Front-Bench colleagues an excellent publication from March 1997 called “A New Partnership for Care in Old Age.” We had a tremendous scheme then, which unfortunately we were not able to implement because power passed to Labour, whose Government did nothing in the 13 years when they had stewardship of these matters. I also welcome the measures to tackle immigration, although I suspect they will have limited effect.

Finally on the good news front, I think the Prime Minister has done a fantastic job of promoting Britain’s interests overseas, particularly in developing overseas trade. We have seen some reflection of that in increased trade with non-EU countries, as against trade with the EU, which, as we all know, is in meltdown.

Two issues were not mentioned: gay marriage and Europe. My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) set out why the same-sex marriages proposal is a complete diversion. We should not be doing this: the Government have no mandate for it, it is deeply divisive, particularly among many Conservative supporters, and I think we should drop it here and now.

Immigration is a big issue and it is relevant to this debate, as the Government are seeking to put in place changes to prevent people from benefiting from our taxpayers’ money by coming to this county simply to tap into our health care system. There have been encouraging signs. The observations made by the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron) show precisely what has been wrong in this country, in that anybody wishing to speak up on immigration has been told that their tone is wrong, or this is not the right time, or they are insensitive. His Front-Bench colleagues have now recognised that the kinds of policy he supports have been deeply damaging to his party. Labour supporters are as concerned about immigration as Conservative supporters and, I suspect, Liberal Democrat supporters.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Does he agree that we should take the blandishments of the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron) in respect of Romania and Bulgaria with a pinch of salt, given that the Labour Government predicted that between 13,000 and 15,000 eastern European citizens would come to the UK, yet over 1.2 million have come here since 2004? Labour got the figures catastrophically wrong.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was going to tell the right hon. Gentleman that some 1% of the Romanian population of working age, which is 150,000 people, have indicated that they wish to come to this country, as have 4% of the 4.9 million Bulgarians of working age, which is another 200,000 people. That is another 350,000 people. We cannot go on building houses and cities. As MigrationWatch has said, we will need eight cities the size of Birmingham if we are going to accommodate all the people who wish to come to this country.

I welcome the fact that the Opposition have at long last recognised that this is a serious issue. They have not a snowball’s chance in hell of being re-elected unless they are prepared to recognise the concerns of the British people. Under Labour’s stewardship, there was a deliberate act of policy: Andrew Neather, a speech writer at No. 10, said immigration was being positively encouraged by the Labour Government in order to

“rub the Right’s nose in diversity.”

They knowingly inflicted this on the country—it was not done by accident—and they left this Government with the most awful backlog of cases to deal with, which is unfair to those who ought to be allowed to stay in the UK and to those in our country whose lives are affected by the presence here of people who should have been deported.